This invention refers to a floor and wall cleaner specially designed to be used in critical areas with difficult accessibility or restricted access, such as pools for housing a reactor vessel at a nuclear power station, in which human presence must be avoided as far as possible and, should this be necessary, this must be for the shortest possible time.
According to the invention, the floor cleaner comprises:                A casing or housing provided with a suction mouth;        Drive belts on each side, driven by respective motors;        Inner rollers, provided with mutually independent drive media;        A set of outer rollers with permanent opposite rotation;        At least one elastic hinge of at least one axle carrying the rollers;        Gear motor assemblies for the roller movement        A set of sealed connections and a first control body;        Lighting systems;        At least one camera for taking pictures;        A float or buoy of variable volume;        A set of turbines for gripping the wall;        A set of turbines with lateral movement; and        An anchorage for holding the float or buoy to the body of the casing or housing.        
The pools in which the reactor of a nuclear power station is housed are made up of a cubicle which may be in a regular or irregular shape and have dimensions that can range from one or two dozen meters on the smallest horizontal side to several dozen meters on the larger side, with a height of several meters, able to temporarily house a large number of the components of the reactor in the dismantling stage.
The base of the pools tends to be of irregular shape. On one hand there are small-sized recesses which have to be cleaned preferably before emptying the pool, as these could contain radioactive material, and there are also uneven parts of the floor, amongst other reasons due to the bolts for holding the vessel of the reactor.
This thus requires a device for cleaning the floors of the pools in which reactors of nuclear power stations are housed which is able to clean narrow spaces, to the maximum width of the apparatus and which is able to get over any small obstacles which it might come up against.
As well as the floors, particles are deposited on the walls of these pools. Conventional devices are not nevertheless able to clean the walls, as if they did so it would be the suction force of the absorption system which would have to keep the device attached to the wall. Since these devices have to be made as far as possible of stainless steel or some other material able to be decontaminated, they have a high minimum weight, and the absorption systems conventionally used are not able to maintain their grip. Furthermore, even when the absorption capacity is enough to maintain a grip, any irregularity or space would cause loss of adherence, and the device would fall to the floor and have to be positioned again. Since the positioning task is extremely delicate, this risk in an installation of this sort makes such a system inoperative.